


Things Happen (That’s All They Ever Do)

by theshipsfirstmate



Series: Things Happen [4]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, blackvibe fic, rip pretty bird, with a teeny hint of captain canary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-06
Updated: 2016-05-06
Packaged: 2018-06-06 17:39:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6763735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theshipsfirstmate/pseuds/theshipsfirstmate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Arrow 4x18, pre-Flash 2x20. The news reaches Central City. </p>
<p>"Cisco gets proper drunk that night, really for the first time since his night with Laurel. To rub salt in the wound, he goes to the dive bar he thinks of as theirs. The place where she surprised him and charmed his sorry self off the barstool and got him home safe and kissed him back."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Happen (That’s All They Ever Do)

_Probably the final installment of the “[Things Happen](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Fseries%2F390178&t=OGExZmIzNGIxZjc5MDQ0ZjI4ZGJkMGQyYWRlODgxYTM3ZWQ5MzY1NixEM2JBUnFDNw%3D%3D)” BlackVibe series. Maybe. I could see one more little one potentially happening given some spoilers. Also, I wrote this before I saw the Ramon brothers in Flash 2x20 and now I really want a fic where Cisco tells Dante about Laurel. So that might happen._

_Thanks to everyone who was aboard this little ship. I waxed poetic about it[on Tumblr](http://theshipsfirstmate.tumblr.com/post/143937713994/flarrow-fic-things-happen-thats-all-they-ever), but I'm thankful for each and every one of you._

_Title, once more, from “[Things Happen](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DPNpSpMMfQis&t=YjMyMmE2ZDAyNTIyMjRjZjM5ZWMzY2YxNTQ3NjEzYjdhZWM5MWVkMyxEM2JBUnFDNw%3D%3D)” by Dawes._

**Things Happen (That’s All They Ever Do)**

Two years and however many close calls later, and Cisco still catches himself thinking it can’t possibly get worse.

It’s always a mistake.

Things can always get worse. His idol and mentor turns out to be evil. No wait, not just evil, a goddamn time-traveling supervillain. Friends turn into enemies, and not many enemies turn to friends. People die. Sometimes, they come back to haunt him. And if they don’t, well, there’s an alternate version of them out there on another Earth somewhere who’s probably evil.

There’s still a lot he doesn’t know, but one thing Cisco’s learned for sure is that things can always get worse.

Then, one night in the lab, as he and his friends are trying to piece things back together after the latest catastrophe – _Jay is Zoom. Zoom took Barry’s speed. And then took Caitlin. Things can always get worse._ – Barry’s phone rings.

“Felicity?” his friend’s voice is immediately sharp with concern, and Cisco sits up straight. “Whoa, slow down. What’s wrong?”

Barry pauses for a long moment, and Cisco can hear Felicity’s voice, frantic on the other end of the line, but can’t make out any of her words. Then, his friends face falls in a very specific way, one Cisco wishes he didn’t recognize quite so well.

“Is she…” Barry asks the half-question, and when his eyes snap closed, that’s the answer.

That’s when Cisco vibes out.

It’s Laurel, he sees her three times in a row – mask on and then off, eyes open and then closed – so quickly that it takes a moment after his head has cleared to piece any of it together. It’s not the first time he’s vibed on her, especially since they started this strange little half-thing between them, but this vision is vivid, and devastating.

_Mask on, eyes open._ Wide open, too wide, and stricken with fear. Terror creeping in as the light goes out like a candle being snuffed.

No.

_Mask off, eyes open._ The light’s back, a low, warm flicker that he recognizes, though he’s never seen her without makeup like this. She’s sitting down, or laying back, in what looks like a hospital gown.

No.

_Mask off, eyes closed._ She’s paler, and there’s no light left to spot.

“No!”

Barry glances to him, registering and confirming his reaction in one tragic moment, before turning to explain it to Caitlin. When he hears his friend say Laurel’s name aloud, his brain whites out in grief and denial. He’s so far gone, for a moment, he actually forgets.

“You have to go back.” Cisco realizes the impossibility of what he’s just said a moment before Barry’s face falls, brow furrowing in concern.

“Cisco, buddy, I’m sorry,” his friend tells him, with a voice that sounds more grief-stricken then apologetic. Even if he _could_ … “But you know I can’t do that.”

He does. Cisco’s smart enough to understand the consequences of tampering with the timeline, toying with fate. Barry doesn’t have his speed, so it’s a moot point, anyway. _Even if he could…_

What was life like before this? It’s like he can’t remember anymore.

“Even if…” Barry offers, but Cisco, two steps ahead of him for the first time in a few years, has heard enough.

“Yeah, I got it,” he snaps and lets the ringing in his ears drown out the calls of his friends as he storms from the lab.

It dawns on him that this is the first time he’s physically been able to extricate himself from the pull of Team Flash in almost two years. With his speed, Barry – The Flash, rather – practically has his own force field. There’s no escaping a man who can be almost everywhere at once. But now, Cisco can walk away, run even.

If Barry needs him, he’ll have to come after him like a normal person. But they just let him walk out. He can’t help but think to himself that if Caitlin were here, she’d be the one chasing him all the way to the parking lot.

She’d tell him that she was sorry, and that she knew how he felt. And she’d be right, but it wouldn’t make him feel any better. Besides, she might have a unique perspective about losing someone to the greater good, but she didn’t know anything about this, about them. He probably would have told her as much, too, and then he would have had to watch as she flinched.

He gets proper drunk that night, really for the first time since his first night with Laurel. To rub salt in the wound, he goes to the dive bar he thinks of as theirs. The place where she surprised him and charmed his sorry self off the barstool and got him home safe and kissed him back.

Cisco asks for his own bottle, and has a drink for every regret until he starts to lose count. One for a proper first date that never was and won’t ever be. One for being too embarrassed to text her and ask where she got that breakfast burrito that morning. One for never getting to ride on her motorcycle. One for letting her sleep in the guest room. One for being so afraid to push her away that he never really reached for her in the first place.

One for never really telling her, _“Te amo.”_

* * *

He offers his Uber driver a 50% tip upfront to not talk to him on the way home, just because he’s feeling like a dick and doesn’t want to shoot the shit about anything. He fumbles with his phone during the ride, typing messages he’ll never send, scrolling through his pictures to find one heavily-encrypted file that opens to reveal a pristine scan of the photograph of him with the Black Canary.

The worst part, he realizes when he gets back to his apartment, is that he’s still so hopped up on grief and adrenaline that even most of a bottle of tequila isn’t going to be enough to knock him out. He’s just up, and drunk, so he puts water on for coffee in the hopes of curbing at least one of those disasters.

The process triggers an undeniable emotional response, the pot, the colador, even the ceramic coffee container is heavy with morose sentiment. It’s usually pleasant, a wave that washes over him, tangling him up in memories of his sweet abuelita and his pretty bird, the two women he shared the tradition with. Tonight though, the feelings burn a hole clean through his chest. Tonight, he’s alone. Tonight, his memories are the only place those women exist.

He opens the cabinet where he keeps the coffee mugs, and, like some kind of mockery, the one he saves for Laurel is right there next to his favorite. Of course it is. He always keeps it up front, just in case. He never knew when she was going to show up, but he was always ready for her.

Cisco takes it in his hand, turning it over in his palm before chucking it at his front door. It shatters into a maybe two dozen black and yellow pieces, and he immediately regrets the impulse.

He must go into a bit of a daze after that, because the next thing he knows, someone’s knocking at the door, and it sounds like they’ve been doing it for a while. He grumbles all the way to the door, half-worried that if his landlord tries to kick him out right now, he’s just going to let him.

But it’s not his landlord, or the police. It’s someone he’s never seen before, not like this anyway. It’s the White Canary. She’s in her suit – and on another night he’d take moment to appreciate the job he did with that one – but over that is a blue winter overcoat that looks sort of familiar, furry hood tucked back behind her ears.

“Sara?” He fights the urge to hug her, tells himself it’s the tequila.

“Hi Cisco.” When he opens the door further, she follows the sound of broken ceramic down to the floor. “You made a mess.” Then her face goes blurry and he starts to cry just as she wraps him in the fluffy arms of her coat.

_“I’m sorry.”_  They breathe the words into each other’s necks at the same time, and that makes him smile a little.

They pull back and Sara just gives him a sad smile. After a beat, Cisco realizes he’s not sure what to do next.

“Do you want some coffee?” It feels like the polite thing to do, but part of him is glad when she turns down the offer, remaining in the doorframe, shuffling her feet.

“Cisco, I uh, I’m here to ask you if you want to come with me,” she tells him. He pauses, mentally sorting through her possible meaning, long enough for her to keep explaining.

“Listen, I can’t… _we_ can’t go back in time and…fix this. I’m sure you understand that.”

He nods, even as he tries to plot an argument that might convince her. Because they CAN, actually, they’re some of the only people in the world who could legitimately do that. The knowledge only makes him feel more helpless.

“But,” Sara continues, “that doesn’t mean we can’t go a little sideways…”

God, this is maybe the worst conversation in history to have after a bottle of tequila.

“You’re saying…”

“I’ll take you to her,” Sara confirms the idea floating around his hazy brain. “To Laurel. If you want to say..something. I didn’t go for the funeral, but I feel like I should at least go see her. Even if it isn’t goodbye.”

“How?” He knows a little bit about what her group – Kendra and Palmer and Professor Stein and the others –  have been up to, but very few of the specifics.

“Borrowed the Waverider for a few minutes,” she shrugs, like that phrase doesn’t mean she’s probably hotwired an actual time machine. “Not even, really.”

“The Waverider?” He’s already putting his coat on.

“I’ll have you back in no time…literally.” She points to the pieces of mug scattered on his hardwood floor. “I can have you back before you break that, if you want.”

It takes him a second. “No, you can't…”

“It’s a joke, Cisco,” Sara interrupts, throwing an arm around him that he leans into. “Just a little time travel joke.”

* * *

He’ll kick himself in the morning for practically ignoring his first ever ride in a real time machine, but he can’t focus on anything other the very specific kind of mental block that hits right when you need to say something important and profound and you only have one chance. He fiddles with his phone, and it takes him more than a minute to look up and realize the crew member who offered him the wi-fi password was really A.I.

Then, all of a sudden, they’re there. They’re standing in front of a gravestone in the dark, and when Cisco gets a light on it, he realizes what they did.

“The Black Canary,” he reads, and it’s Sara’s breath that catches behind him.

“Do you want to go first?” He turns to make the offer and accidentally catches Laurel’s sister in the light from his phone. He hopes he does a good job of pretending not to notice the tears she’s swiping away.

“I’m okay,” Sara answers, with a grateful smile. “Goodbyes are kind of beyond me, at this point, if you get what I’m saying.”

“You said something like that earlier,” he observes, along with the revelation that he’s starting to sober up in the Star City cemetery, pre-dawn dew soaking through the mesh of his sneakers. “You’re really telling me that, because you’ve come back from the dead two times over and currently work as a time traveling badass, life and death as linear constructs is a concept that you’ve just like, surpassed?”

“I’m saying I’m as bad at goodbyes as you clearly are,” Laurel’s sister shoots back, with something light that makes him feel almost peaceful for the first time since Barry got the fateful call. Before, even.

“Yeah,” he mumbles, turning back to face the gravestone reluctantly. “Yeah, I’m no good at goodbyes.”

A thought occurs to him then, and even though he knows it’s going to hurt like hell, Cisco pulls his phone from his pocket and thumbs through until he finds the notes app and opens the saved draft.

“Laurel, I swore to myself that the next time I saw you, I would tell you how I felt, for real.” He’d give anything for a little bit of religion right now, to believe that she was somewhere listening, fights the feeling that it’s just him talking to a rock. And her sister. “I even, uh, wrote it down, so I’d be less nervous, or something.”

He clears his throat. Feet rustle behind him and he realizes that Sara is taking a few steps back.

“I know that our lives are anything but normal,” he reads, trying not to let his voice shake. “I know that you don’t trust easy and we can’t even promise each other that we’ll come home at the end of the day.

“I know that the first time I told you that I loved you, you thought I meant the Black Canary,” he remembers. “You weren’t wrong, but you weren’t right, either. I loved you both. There wasn’t one without the other.”

That certainty, he realizes, is now etched into her tombstone.

“I knew, I think even then.” Cisco starts to choke on his words as he nears the end of his declaration, remembering all the things he had promised himself he was going do. “And I just wanted to tell you that. To tell you that I’m here, I’m with you for whatever you want, because the only thing I need is you. And wanted to say it, just once, because I knew I’d regret it if…if I never never got the chance.”

It’s time to go, he knows that. But walking away feels like such a finality, feels like putting a big fancy bow on the biggest “what if” of his life.

“I’ll look for you,” he swears, to his pretty bird and whoever else might be listening. “In every timeline, on every Earth, I’ll try and find you.”

He turns and nods at Sara, who doesn’t bother trying to hide her tears this time around. She turns to make her way back to the Waverider and before Cisco follows, he makes Laurel one last promise.

_“Hasta entonces,”_ he tells her, _“te amo.”_


End file.
